Alibaba Cloud has launched $1 billion Project for Startups APAC

 

Alibaba Cloud has launched Project AsiaForward with a funding of $1 billion that will help the talented developers and growth of technology startups in Asia Pacific (APAC). The announcement was made at Alibaba Cloud Summit 2021.

“Our strategic roadmap for APAC includes targeted investments to facilitate the digital transformation of local businesses. We see these investments as all the more timely given the impact of the pandemic and the sharp rise in demand for digital business tools. Equally important is our focus on talent development and nurturing a digitally-competent workforce, which we see as a key challenge for many businesses to overcome going forward,” said Selina Yuan, General Manager of International Business Unit, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

The Project AsiaForward’s three core programs are called DigiTalents Forward, AI Forward, and DigiEntrepreneurs Forward. The company kicked off the DIgitTalents Forward programme in Singapore with the School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE), and NTU-Alibaba Singapore Joint Research Institute (JRI) at Nanyang Technological University.

In other announcements at Alibaba Cloud Summit 2021, the company has launched its first data center in the Philippines towards the end of the year. This will help support digitalization of local businesses through a variety of products and services including Elastic Compute Service (ECS), database, global network solution, Content Delivery Network (CDN) and storage services. Also, the company will build its first innovation center in Malaysia. Alibaba Group also unveiled a new one-stop e-commerce livestreaming solution to help global merchants of all sizes launch live, interactive channels to offer personalized online shopping experience.

 

Fastly Reports Software Bug that Triggered Internet Outage

Fastly Inc., the company which was behind a major global internet outage this week, in a recent announcement, had stated that the incident was caused by a bug that was present in its software, which triggered when one of its customers changed the network settings. The outage that occurred on Tuesday raised several questions about the reliance of the internet on a few infrastructure companies. Fastly's issue knocked out high-traffic websites, which also included major government websites.

Fastly primarily operates a group of servers strategically that have been placed around the world to help customers store content close to their end-users quickly and safely. The company post gave a timeline of events and promised its customers to examine and explain why it has failed to detect the software bug during its testing process.

Fastly said the bug was in a software update shipped to customers on May 12 but was not triggered until one unidentified customer carried out settings changes that triggered the problem, which caused 85 percent of the network to return errors. The outage was broad and severe, and it had a massive impact on Fastly's customers and everyone who relied on them. The company immediately apologized to all its users on its blog post.

 

Orange teams up with insurance firm AXA Assurance to buy a majority stake in DabaDoc

In a recent announcement, Orange has stated that it has joined hands with insurance firm AXA Assurance Maroc to buy the majority of stakes in DabaDoc, which is a Moroccan digital healthcare platform. Besides the financial investment of an unspecified amount, the deal is also primarily focused on Orange providing access to its main digital payments infrastructure to help DabaDoc grow its business.

DabaDoc, an online medical appointment management platform, is a free service in that it costs customers nothing to make an appointment with a medical and healthcare professional. However, the service does not cover treatment costs. The company has not yet specified how many medical professionals might have to pay to use this beneficiary service.

Orange's tri-party partnership with DabaDoc will benefit from the broad experience of AXA, which is the global leader in health insurance, and Orange's technological expertise and payment solutions will enable digital solutions will be developed rapidly to scale up and benefit patients and the entire African healthcare ecosystem. AXA's involvement with Orange will help its policyholders interact with healthcare organizations and professionals through its appointment booking system and remote consultation infrastructure.

 

 

Internet Outage Brings Down Several Major Retail and News Websites

Earlier this morning at 6.44 AM (Eastern Time), many governments and news websites in the U.S. and Europe were inaccessible, with at least one internet outage tracker reporting widespread disruptions. Sites like the U.K. government's main public-services portal, major U.S. and European news outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN, and Le Monde, were shut down.

Down Detector, an internet services tracker, reported the spike in outages. Many social media users described widespread outages in various regions. Fastly, an operator of the network service said issues with its services, though it was unclear whether the broader website outages were related. The company stated that it is currently investigating potential impact to performance with its CDN services.

Fastly's status page indicated the company had identified a problem with its service, stating that a fix was being implemented. Fastly also observed traffic volume to drop by about 75 percent, according to network monitoring company Kentik Inc. Most of the websites went down and displayed a simple error message in plain text, which said "Error 503 Service Unavailable," along with other codes.

 

 

Jeff Bezos to travel to Space on Blue Origin's first passenger flight

Jeff Bezos, America's business tycoon, media proprietor, investor, founder, and CEO of the multinational technology company Amazon in a recent announcement, has stated that he will travel to space next month on his company Blue Origin's first-ever passenger flight. His brother Mark and an auction winner will be joined on the flight scheduled for July 20th.

It is reported that they will fill three of the six seats on the first crewed suborbital flight, which will travel to an altitude of more than 340,000 feet. Jeff Bezos wrote in an Instagram post that he had been dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, he, along with his brother, will be traveling to space. He said it would be the most incredible adventure with his best friend.

Recently, Blue Origin kicked off a three-phase online auction that offered one seat on the first flight of its New Shepard spacecraft, named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard.  The sealed portion of the online auction began on May 5th, which allowed the bidders to submit any amount for getting a golden opportunity to ride into space. The second online bidding runs through June 10th. The bidding will conclude on June 12th.